EDITORIAL | If it’s OK for Steinhoff, it should be OK for Ace and Sodi

From SA’s biggest accounting fraud at Steinhoff comes one of the most magnanimous “gifts” to the country’s poorly funded corruption-busting institutions — the Hawks and National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

“You don’t have funds to investigate us? Well, no problem. Let’s fund you so you can investigate us, whatever the consequences to ourselves,” seems to be Steinhoff’s poisoned chalice to the bodies’ chiefs, who seem at sea on how to prosecute the case. 

And the authorities, represented by NPA spokesperson Sipho Ngwema, say there is nothing wrong with the NPA receiving R24m in assistance from the subject of an investigation. In any case, he asserts, the old board responsible for the R150bn fraud has been replaced. Christo Wiese, once Steinhoff’s biggest shareholder, has stepped aside, as has Markus Jooste, the CEO on whose watch poor people’s pensions disappeared. In addition, the funds from Steinhoff go directly to forensic investigators, not government institutions.

Justice minister Ronald Lamola says the case is a priority for the government, which is committed to fighting corruption. Total government expenditure is about R2-trillion a year. Yet it couldn’t find R24m to fund this priority, which left the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) R20bn poorer in the country’s biggest post-democracy fraud case. 

Ngwema explains: “People need to understand that, first of all, this is a new board that instituted the investigation against directors that have left. So, if you understand this, the people involved in those activities are gone. So, the company as well, they see themselves as victims. We would have outsourced that function in any case, but we are already under pressure to deliver on this particular matter.”

There is no better way to point out the obvious: relying on Steinhoff to fund a forensic investigation into Steinhoff is ridiculous.

To be flippant, this is like arguing that a criminal who commits murder and then undergoes some change in beliefs can later claim they’re a victim of the person they were before their rebirth. Our jails would be empty. The juristic entity Steinhoff is pre- and post-fraud is the same. Ngwema ought reasonably to know this. His comment about Steinhoff seeing itself as a victim is beside the point.

There is no better way to point out the obvious: relying on Steinhoff to fund a forensic investigation into Steinhoff is ridiculous. The outcome is already tainted. In the circumstances, the only acceptable outcome of such a funded probe is one that apportions blame on Steinhoff and leads to successful prosecution of all those involved. Anything to the contrary will only confirm suspicions that the Hawks and NPA were bribed into whitewashing the probe. That the entities could put themselves into this corner boggles the mind, given the political concerns and race dynamics raised in connection with the case. 

The two institutions have innumerably been accused of prioritising fraud and corruption cases involving black people, especially politicians. Corruption, the two institutions are aware, is considered to have a black face, not because white people are not corrupt, but because the justice system is racist. 

Now that Steinhoff presents an opportunity for the Hawks and NPA to investigate and successfully prosecute white males, the very accused firm (Steinhoff) funds a probe into itself. How benevolent! The mollycoddling plays right into the hands of politicians. They will be correct to ask why the state doesn’t, for example, allow businessman Edwin Sodi and ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, arrested for asbestos-related fraud and corruption cases in the Free State, to fund the state’s forensic report for their prosecution? Surely what is good for Wiese must be good for Magashule too. 

In the end, though, crooks are crooks, whether they are black or white. And the processes of putting together evidence against them must be above reproach and seen to be fair. The putrid stench around Steinhoff’s R24m gift or, rather, poisoned chalice, and the inexplicable kid gloves with which the NPA treats the case serve only to entrench the view that we are, as people, treated differently before the law. This is anathema for our democracy. The bright sparks at the NPA aren’t that bright, after all.